Morrison County Sheriff Michel Wetzel, center, speaks during a press conference at the Morrison County Government Center in Little Falls, Minn., on Monday, November 26, 2012. At left is Morrison County Attorney Brian Middendorf, at right is Drew Evans with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
(Pioneer Press: Ben Garvin)

“In your left eye” — Audio-recorded statement made by Byron Smith about a half-hour before the fatal shootings of Nick Brady and Haile Kifer, who was shot several times, including in her left eye.

The deluge of hate mail and email coming into Washington County Attorney Pete Orput’s office and home has dwindled to a trickle two weeks after guilty verdicts in the trial of Little Falls homeowner Byron Smith. But the letters still come.

“People were very upset,” said Orput, who, along with Assistant Washington County Attorney Brent Wartner, convinced a jury that Smith planned and carried out the cold-blooded executions of two unarmed teenage cousins who broke into his home on Thanksgiving Day 2012.

“The gist of all of them seemed to be, ‘How dare you prosecute a man who was only defending his home?’ ” Orput said. “I didn’t respond because if people have their beliefs, they are never going to let the facts ever interfere with those beliefs. You can throw facts at them all day and they are just going to (swat) them away.”

It took the 12-member jury less than three hours to convict Smith, 65, on two counts of first-degree premeditated murder and two counts of second-degree premeditated murder. The case will be the subject of a one-hour NBC “Dateline” scheduled to air Friday night.

I thought after listening to Smith’s audiotaped statements to police that what initially sounded like self-defense degenerated into overkill. His rambling, bone-chilling audio recordings made before, during and after the shootings left little doubt in my mind: It was murder.

Smith is now serving life without parole, pending the outcome of an appeal before the state Supreme Court.

‘BIZARRE CASE’

Orput volunteered to take the case after the Minnesota attorney general’s office declined to prosecute it at the request of Morrison County Attorney Brian Middendorf. Middendorf’s four-member prosecutorial staff was handling eight other murder cases at the time. He turned to the Minnesota County Attorneys Association for help; its then-president, Don Ryan contacted Orput.

A simple case it wasn’t, Orput told me this week as he provided a postmortem of the case over lunch. Orput has described the shootings as both a tragedy all around and “the most bizarre case I’ve ever been involved with.”

“The community was divided,” said Orput, who has handled dozens of murder cases throughout the Twin Cities and the state during his 26-year career as a county and state prosecutor. “He was being portrayed by some as a hero.”

Here is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for clarity:

Q: You said you were not confident in the beginning with this case, in spite of the overwhelming incriminating evidence. Why?

A: I was not. I knew the community was very divided. I read the local paper online and they covered it extensively. And I thought I was walking into a very difficult case and prepared to accept that I might lose it.

Q: No doubt in your mind Smith planned this?

A: This was all a set-up. He moved his truck. He had the tarp already waiting (used to move and wrap the bodies in the basement where the shootings took place). He’s got a chair and a loaded shotgun in the back room in case he was overpowered and had a place to go run in back. He had surveillance equipment going.

Q: Did you talk to the jurors afterward?

A: No. But one of the (Morrison County attorney) assistants spoke to one of them. Apparently they went back and went, ‘We should take a preliminary vote to see how far apart we are. All of you? First-degree? How about the other one (second-degree premeditated). All of you?’ Right off the gate. I knew it was going to be either you believed he had a right to do it, or you believed he was completely out of line.

Q: You still have the trial prosecutor in you?

A: Yes. When I got to Ramsey County, I saw that if you want to do good, you want to get the power to do good. And I didn’t see the defense attorneys as having that much power. The one with the power is the prosecutor and if they want to do good, they can. They can decide. It’s a tremendous amount of power and discretion and it still scares me. I can charge somebody with a crime, make a mistake, dismiss it and, in the meantime, I’ve destroyed them. You have to hit the right nail with the right-size hammer. Some (prosecutors) walk around with a sledgehammer and they bend a lot of nails and they bust up a lot of Sheetrock.

Q: Your election is coming up. Some people are saying that you took on this case for political mileage.

A: Absolutely not. I don’t give a goddamn about politics … or the political ramifications of a homicide. What’s the worst thing that can happen to me? The folks don’t re-elect me, I go back to Hennepin (his former robbery-division assistant prosecutor job). You’ve never met more powerless victims than those who have had a gun put to their head and robbed and humiliated. If I would have lost that case, I would have been vilified far more than I am.

Q: Will this verdict make homeowners reluctant to defend themselves if someone breaks into their home?

A: I don’t think anybody should read any more into this case than what it was. It was a well-planned, well-thought-out first-degree murder. That’s what it was. It has nothing to do with defending your dwelling other than he committed the murders in his dwelling.

In my view he lured those kids in. He wanted them to come in. Remember, the surveillance video shows Nick (Brady, one of the shooting victims) looking in the windows, going around the house, (for) 11 minutes, walking around. If he (Smith) wanted to, he could have picked up the phone and dialed 911, come out with a rifle: ‘Hey, freeze!’ He had every option in the world. But he chose not to.

… There was nothing reasonable about what he did. The way he shot them. How he lured them in. The number of shots. The choices he made were no different than the choices made by every premeditated murderer that I’ve dealt with. They choose to do it, they work hard to do it and they get it done.”

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

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